Competitor Analysis: 8 Awesome Third Party Tools

My last post discussed three awesome AdWords tools for gaining and leveraging competitive insights. In this post, we’ll take a look at a number of popular third party tools.

Analyzing the competition from a multitude of vantage points can be super helpful in gaining a complete picture of where you stand in the competitive landscape. As we’ve discussed, the idea isn’t to craft strategy directly in response the your competitors, but rather to give you more context, provide ideas for improvements, and identify new opportunities.

Third party tools are especially effective when used in combination with Google’s suite of internal AdWords tools. Needless to say, the tools on offer within AdWords primarily provide insight on how to up-level click-side performance — keyword ideas, traffic estimates, competitive auction insights, etc.

The following tools will allow to broaden the scope of your competitive insight by assessing website health (from a competitive standpoint), understanding user flow between your site and others, health and impact of your social profiles, and much more. Additionally, these tools allow you to dive deeper into your advertising performance via a number of features not contained in the AdWords competitive reports.

- Heat map for your ads (where users hover and click)
- Shows where ads are running for top brands and sites

- Optimize your ads based on user interaction
- Get placement ideas

SEMRush.com

- Shows top competitors of your competitors (Is your site there??)
- Shows ad text and avg. position for top keywords
- Provides information on competitor social profiles

- Find out which competitors consider you a threat
- Make tactical decisions about which competitors to target
- Enhance social strategy

WhatRunsWhere.com

- Shows you where your competitors are advertising
- Shows you which ads they’re using

- Understand where your competition is advertising
- Make placement decisions based on areas of low / high competition

GooglePageInsights.com

- Great for developers
- Provides user experience insights with suggestions for how to optimize
- Provides site speed insights with suggestions for how to optimize
- Provides image and formatting suggestions

- Extremely comprehensive tool for competitive insight
- Understanding where users go after they leave allows you to directly compare your user experience against the next place they go. Very powerful!
- Share of voice shows you provides a “zoomed out” perspective of the health of your overall web presence.